Silas Newton

Silas Newton was an American oil producer and promoter. According to his FBI file, he claimed to own a gadget that could detect minerals and oil.

In 1950 Newton's stories of crashed flying saucers, including one he said came down on leased land in the Mojave Desert, appeared in Frank Scully's best-selling book 'Behind the Flying Saucers'. The tale of recovered craft and small bodies spread widely and became a model for later crash-retrieval stories, including the Aztec, New Mexico, legend.

The story did not hold up. In 1952 the journalist J. P. Cahn exposed it in True magazine, and Newton told investigators he had never seen a flying saucer and had only repeated what others told him. The FBI investigated him for fraud over many years; its Vault file covers 1951 to 1970.

Mainstream historians and skeptical investigators treat the Newton material as a hoax tied to a scheme to sell worthless detection devices. It still matters because it shows how early saucer rumors spread through books, newspapers and informants into government files.